The following abbreviations are herewith defined, at least some of which are referred to within the following description of the present invention.
BFD Bidirectional Forwarding Detection
CCM Connectivity Check Message
CCI Connectivity Check Interval
CFM Connectivity Fault Management
DA Destination Address
ERO Explicit Route Object
ESP Ethernet Switched Path
GELS GMPLS Ethernet Label Switching
GMPLS Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching
IEEE Institute of Electrical and Electronics
LTM Link Trace Message
MA Maintenance Association
MAID Maintenance Association Identifier
MAC Media Access Control
MD Maintenance Domain
MEP Maintenance End Point
MEP ID MEP Identifier
MHF MIP Half Function
MPLS Multi-Protocol Label Switching
OAM Operations, Administration, and Maintenance
P2P Point-to-Point
P2MP Point-to-MultiPoint
PBB Provider Backbone Bridge
RDI Remote Defect Indicator
RSVP-TE Resource Reservation Protocol-Traffic Engineering
SA Source Address
SDH Synchronous Digital Hierarchy
TLV Type-Length-Value
VID VLAN Identifier
VLAN Virtual Local Area Network
The following references provide some background information which is related to the discussion about the present invention. The contents of the following references are hereby incorporated by reference herein.
1. [Fedyk-GELS-PBBTE] D. Fedyk et al. “GMPLS control of Ethernet”, Internet Draft, work in progress, May 2007.
2. [GELS-Framework] T. Nadeau “GMPLS Ethernet Label Switching Architecture and Framework”, Internet Draft, work in progress, Oct. 22, 2007. [GELS-Framework] and [Fedyk-GELS-PBBTE] are extending the GMPLS control plane to support the establishment of point-to-point PBB-TE data plane connections. GMPLS established PBB-TE connections are referred to herein as Ethernet LSPs. GELS enables the application of MPLS-TE and GMPLS provisioning and recovery features in Ethernet networks.
3. [GMPLS-OAM] D. Fedyk et al. “OAM Requirements for Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) Networks”, Internet Draft, work in progress, Feb. 25, 2008.
4. [IEEE-CFM] “IEEE 802.1ag, Standard for Connectivity Fault Management”, Dec. 17, 2007. Ethernet CFM: Defines an adjunct connectivity monitoring OAM flow to check the liveliness of Ethernet networks. OAM refers to a group of network management functions that provide network fault indication, performance information, and data and diagnosis functions.
5. [IEEE-PBBTE] “IEEE 802.1Qay Draft Standard for Provider Backbone Bridging Traffic Engineering”, Jun. 19, 2008. [IEEE-PBBTE]: Decouples Ethernet data and control planes by explicitly supporting external control-management mechanisms to configure static filtering entries in bridges and create explicitly routed Ethernet connections. PBB-TE defines mechanisms for 1:1 protection switching of bidirectional Ethernet connections.
6. [RFC3469] “Framework for Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS)-based Recovery”, RFC 3469, February 2003.
7. [RFC3471] “Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) Signalling Functional Description”, RFC 3471, January 2003.
8. [RFC3473] “Generalized Multi-Protocol Label Switching (GMPLS) Signalling Resource ReserVation Protocol-Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE) Extensions”, RFC 3473, January 2003.
9. [RFC4377] “Operations and Management (OAM) Requirements for Multi-Protocol Label Switched (MPLS) Networks”, RFC 4377, February 2006. [RFC4377] provides requirements to create consistent OAM functionality for MPLS networks.
10. [RFC4420] “Encoding of Attributes for Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) Label Switched Path (LSP) Establishment Using Resource Reservation Protocol-Traffic Engineering (RSVP-TE)”, RFC 4420, February 2006.